Literary Quotes

See also Core English Vocabulary (L) Quotes

Where I come from, it was a heresy to say you wanted to be in movies, leave alone American movies. We were all encouraged to believe that the classics of the theater were the fiery hoops through which you`d have to pass if you were going to have any self-esteem as a performer. It never occurred to me that that was the case. One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible. England is obsessed with where you came from, and they are determined to keep you in that place, be it in a drawing room or in the gutter. The great tradition of liberalism in England is essentially a sponge that absorbs all possibility of change. America looked different to me: the idea of America as a place of infinite possibilities was defined for me through the movies. I`m glad I did the classical work that I did, but it just wasn`t for me. I`m a little bit perverse, and I just hate doing the thing that`s the most obvious.

- Daniel Day-Lewis

Bridget Jones is part of literary lore now and actually to be a part of it is enormously flattering.

- Colin Firth

So much of literary sci-fi is about creating worlds that are rich and detailed and make sense at a social level. We`ll create a world for people and then later present a narrative in that world.

- James Cameron

Since it is impossible to know what`s really happening, we Peruvians lie, invent, dream and take refuge in illusion. Because of these strange circumstances, Peruvian life, a life in which so few actually do read, has become literary.

- Mario Vargas Llosa

There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.

- Mario Vargas Llosa

(on film critics) "There are a few critics overseas, and occasionally a critic will write an astute analysis of the movie. There is value in reading critics that actually have something intelligent to say, but the journalistic community lives in a world of sound bites and literary commerce: selling newspapers, selling books, and they do that simply by trashing things. They don`t criticize or analyze them. They simply trash them for the sake of a headline, or to shock people to get them to buy whatever it is they`re selling."

- George Lucas

I don`t mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one.

- Mark Haddon

At 20, 25, 30, we begin to realise that the possibilities of escape are getting fewer. We have jobs, children, partners, debts. This is the part of us to which literary fiction speaks.

- Mark Haddon

But a writer`s contribution is literary and a film is not literary. When you take that stuff off the page, and cast the people who are going to fit into those roles, that`s what being a director is.

- Taylor Hackford

In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.

- George Orwell

As I said earlier, there are no writers who could create a literary vision of the new reality.

- Andrzej Wajda

I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful, but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn`t play, it has a poignancy to it.

- Jim Jarmusch

Literary fiction, as a strict genre, is all but dead. Meanwhile, most genres flourish.

- Dean Koontz

(on the film adaptations of Bret Easton Ellis books Less Than Zero (1987) and American Psycho (2000)) Those two movies have stripped away his literary devices, and the filmmakers are just trying to tell the story. If you strip away Bret`s devices, you strip away his themes - they`re part and parcel of each other.

- Roger Avary

Sometimes there`s a snobbery among literary types that these people don`t really get it, but in a lot of ways they get it more than the literati. There`s a culture in the background that they understand and know. They get that deeper level.

- Irvine Welsh

You have to remember that in addition to running a literary agency, I am also an ebook publisher.

- Richard Curtis

We now open our mail with gloves and mask, though I can`t imagine why anyone would target a literary agency!

- Richard Curtis

One of the biggest changes that ever occurred in my life was going from the isolation of working part-time as a house painter in Henderson County, to Cornell, where everybody was a literary person.

- Robert Morgan

It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.

- Robert Morgan

I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.

- Robert Morgan

Countries under foreign command quickly forget their history, their past, their tradition, their national symbols, their way of living, often their own literary language.

- Slobodan Milosevic

I did not win and in fact I was called into the principal`s office for a consultation with my parents. But that was the beginning of my literary career.

- William Joyce

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

- John Cheever

I am in the Master of Professional Writing program teaching Humor Writing, Literary and Dramatic.

- Shelley Berman

Today, there are more opportunities for writers in terms of access to larger success, but it`s more difficult to publish a literary novel in the lower ranges. In other words, you almost have to hit a home run. You can hit a triple, maybe, but nobody`s interested in a single.

- James Lee Burke

The real literary editors have mostly been fired. Those that remain are all "bottom line" editors; everything depends on the money.

- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I couldn`t speak Japanese very well, passport regulations were changing, I felt British, and my future was in Britain. And it would also make me eligible for literary awards. But I still think I`m regarded as one of their own in Japan.

- Kazuo Ishiguro

People aren`t quite sure what it means when a book is a Booker Prize winner. They`re not quite sure what is being recommended, what literary values it stands for, because every year it stands for something different.

- Kazuo Ishiguro

Anonymous sources are a practice of American journalism in the 20th and 21st century, a relatively recent practice. The literary tradition of anonymity goes back to the Bible.

- Joe Klein

Books on horse racing subjects have never done well, and I am told that publishers had come to think of them as the literary version of box office poison.

- Laura Hillenbrand

I`m not against asking the audience to work, but I think what you have now is a sort of gratuitous deconstruction as a result of a fashion of literary deconstructionism indicating that there are no meanings.

- Jonathan Miller

When authors who write literary fiction begin to write screenplays, everybody assumes that`s the end. Here`s another who`s never going to write well again.

- Richard Russo

It`s too bad for us `literary` enthusiasts, but it`s the truth nevertheless - pictures tell any story more effectively than words.

- William Moulton Marston

A literary critic is someone who can`t write, but who loves to show he would have been a wonderful writer if only he could!

- Brian Lumley

The Bible was written in several languages, embraces many literary forms, and reflects cultures very different from our own. These are important considerations for properly understanding the Bible in its context.

- Troy Perry

I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.

- Stephen King

When I was in college, I was the editor of the literary magazine and insisted neither the editors nor the writers be specifically identified-only our student numbers appeared on the title page. I love that idea and still do.

- Jonathan Carroll

Ever since my youth it has disturbed me that of the literary works that survived their own epoch, so many dealt with historical rather than contemporary subjects.

- Lion Feuchtwanger

Of all the species of literary composition, perhaps biography is the most delightful. The attention concentrated on one individual gives a unity to the materials of which it is composed, which is wanting in general history.

- Robert Hall

One effect that the Nobel Prize seems to have had is that more Arabic literary works have been translated into other languages.

- Naguib Mahfouz

Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem.

- Rick Moody

Maybe when I`m sixty-five I`ll talk about my literary life.

- Rick Moody

But that incessant drive to be out there in the literary universe that was important to me when I was in my twenties, like going to a Paris Review party or whatever, that seems totally irrelevant now.

- Rick Moody

There`s a certain kind of conversation you have from time to time at parties in New York about a new book. The word "banal" sometimes rears its by-now banal head; you say "underedited," I say "derivative." The conversation goes around and around various literary criticisms, and by the time it moves on one thing is clear: No one read the book; we just read the reviews.

- Anna Quindlen

Movie SF is, by definition, dumbed down - there have only been three or four SF movies in the history of film that aspire to the complexity of literary SF.

- Dan Simmons

But it`s not just a game of finding literary references.

- Dan Simmons

First would be the literary side, then the spiritual and philosophical. The political side is required principally because of the necessity of the current Russian position.

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The great break of my literary career was going to law school.

- Scott Turow

The one thing I would like more credit for is being part of a movement which involves recognising the importance of plot and asserting that books of literary worth could be written that had plots.

- Scott Turow

Probably induced by the asthma, I started reading and writing early on, my literary efforts from the age of about nine running chiefly to poetry and plays.

- Patrick White